Due to the inherent nature of what enVision does, yes, monitoring just about anything along these lines is possible. There are a few default out of box correlation rules that scratch the surface, that you could potentialy build off of for monitoring of NIC services.
I've struggled with this very same issue, enVision self montoring, and had mixed success. In most cases you can create successful alerts for what I consider to be non-critical services. The problem is when you try to make a monitoring system monitor itself, you can only go so far. What do you do when the alerter service dies? Nothing is going to get alerted on period. This pretty much stems from the fact that no one, to date, has ever been able to invent the self licking ice cream cone. But if you must attempt it, several options include...
1- Setting up independant envision sites to monitor eachother. Site A pulls NIC logs from Site B who pulls NIC logs from Site C, who pulls NIC logs from Site A. You can then alert on error events as well as an absence of events, if necessary. Could become a nightmare to keep track of though.
2- Leverage your existing windows OS tools already on every appliance to monitor itself and alert on what you want. I'm referring to perfmon and its ability to alert. This works great for the local system stats you're interested monitoring, like memory usage, and others. Be sure to keep an eye on page faults generated by the NIC processes themselves. Memory leaks cause page faults, which force you to bounce your appliance when they get too high... I'm sorry, I digress... This option could be bulky to maintain if you have a lot of applainces, and perfmon does put a tiny load on the system, depending on what you tell it to monitor. It's great for a lot of things though, and is often overlooked.
Otherwise you're best bet might be an external monitoring agent, such as HP OpenView Operations (OVO), Dell probably has an equivalent. If you're on a budget, take a look at nrpe_nt to possibly push back to a nagios instance (an open source monitoring suite) elsewhere in your network. You can read about nrpe_nt here. although I'm sure there are many others like it, most all of which are probably considered unsupported 3rd party applications by enVision support.
Unfortunately there aren't any "really good" options, and I hope that future enVision releases have better functionality in this area. I can't help but recall a quote... Plato once asked Socrates "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who will watch the watchmen? I doubt it was asked on a forum like this, but the question you pose has been lurking around for a few thousand years now. Best of luck.
ryan
